Effects of the nicotine patch on performance during the first week of smoking cessation.

Complaints of feeling unfocused and being unable to concentrate are common during smoking cessation, and such feelings may contribute to a subtle erosion of the motivation to quit. A heterogeneous sample of 21 established smokers (10 women, 11 men) completed this double-blind, placebo-controlled study to test the hypothesis that nicotine replacement during cessation therapy (using a 21-mg nicotine patch) would improve performance on tasks sensitive to nicotine deprivation. Participants were trained to stable performance on simple reaction time, mathematical processing, Sternberg memory, rapid visual-information processing, grammatical reasoning, and the Stroop Color-Word (Stroop) tasks.